Q&A With Nodable’s CEO Dave Rosenberg

We talk to the new cloud management system start-up, dubbed ‘Twitter for machines’

Red Hat’s Stephen O’Grady referred to Nodeable as ‘Twitter for machines’.
We were intrigued by this description and were keen to learn more
behind this innovative San Francisco start-up for analysing and
managing cloud-based data. After launching a private beta last
month we talked to Nodeable’s CEO Dave Rosenberg, formerly of
MuleSoft to talk about his new endeavour and also the future for
cloud data management as they prepare to deploy their public
data.

Where did the idea for Nodeable come from?

The initial idea was born from the frustration of attempting to
use a variety of cloud/system management tools while analysing a
number of different use cases while Neil Levine (Nodeable VP
of Product) and I were working together at Canonical.

The short version is that we struggled to make the existing
tools match the new world of cloud services, which are quite
fleeting. It didn’t make sense to script and automate resources
that were transient, and none of the tools were designed in a
multi-tenant fashion, meaning we didn’t have a breadth of
deployment options.

And, the majority of the available tools are ugly and hard to
use. We wanted to simplify the management tools and take advantage
of the modern compute power the cloud offers.

How long has the company been running?

We started working on the company idea in January 2011 and
started writing code in April 2011.

You describe it as ‘Twitter for machines’- was it a
desire for simpler and more interactive cloud infrastructure that
drove this idea forward?

Twitter for machines was really just an easy way to explain the
idea that we have built a real-time communication and information
application. It was absolutely the case that we wanted to convey
that cloud systems should be simpler to interact with and the
Twitter metaphor though not totally analogous is easy for people to
understand.

Care to elaborate on the technical side of
Nodeable?

Nodeable’s front-end is HTML5, CSS and Node.js. The middle is
Mule, Nginx and jClouds and the back-end is currently MongoDB
though we are in the process of moving to Cassandra.

We run at a managed hosting facility and on AWS EC2. We use
Puppet to manage all of the configurations and scaling
scenarios.

Can you tell us more about the private
beta?

We opted to start with a private beta in order to load test and
to ensure that we have an optimal user experience. We started with
six companies and will have about fifty up and running in
December.

How do you see the cloud data management market at the
moment? Do you feel there is room for further
competitors/innovation?

There is huge opportunity both in terms of revenue and
innovation in the cloud management market. As cloud goes more
mainstream, large enterprises will demand tooling and reliability,
which is largely untapped. I would also argue that we haven’t seen
much in the way of innovation just yet. Compute power itself as
driven by AWS is highly innovative but most of the ecosystem is
just applying the same enterprise approach to cloud as it has to
every other technology.

How do you see the next few years going for Nodeable and
the whole market in general?

The cloud market is really nascent. Analysts expect cloud to be
worth more than $200 billion in the next ten years, which is
obviously tremendous growth.

From the Nodeable perspective, we think we can define and
provide a layer in the new cloud stack – one that takes advantage
of the “digital exhaust” we get from systems and adds intelligence
to data. The gathering and analysis of this data leads into a
systematic approach to managing these services based both on
deterministic responses and predictive analytics.

We believe this intelligence is something that every cloud user
needs as it leads to reduced management costs and higher immediate
value from cloud deployments.

What are your plans for the future?

After the private beta we’ll be adding a series of new cloud
connections for the public beta and GA releases.

Dave Rosenberg is the CEO and Founder of Nodeable, a systems intelligence platform for managing and analysing systems data, making it easy for organizations to interact and collaboratively manage cloud-based systems and services. Previously he was co-founder and CEO of MuleSoft and CIO at Glass, Lewis & Co.